Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “I don’t care what he said to her. It’s simply the fact that he spoke to her at all that’s the issue here,” Michael said, and rubbed his face with his hands.

  “But nevertheless, it does make a difference what he said, doesn’t it?” Balilty asked and wiped the windshield with his hand.

  “No,” said Michael decisively. “I don’t want people who work with me to talk with journalists. Can’t you understand that?”

  Balilty popped his finger joints and looked around in embarrassment. It was obvious that he regretted what he had done or was frightened by its results. “I’m not saying,” he muttered, “but sometimes people . . . Sometimes you maybe even have to . . . There’s no point making a fuss about someone if . . . You don’t have to be such a fanatic.”

  “First of all I’m going to talk to him,” insisted Michael. “I have to hear his version.”

  “Talk to him, talk to him.” Balilty sighed. “Of course you’ll talk to him. It’s necessary to talk, only . . .” The beeper went off and the mobile phone rang. “What good is it going to do you?” Balilty said, and picked up the mobile phone, listened for a moment and said: “Good for you. Talk to him yourself. He’s here next to me in the car, and stop signaling on the radio. Do you want more journalists to get involved? I’m not even putting you on the speaker. Here, take it,” he said to Michael, and handed him the phone. “She has news. It’s Tzilla,” and he hissed her name meanly, as if blaming her for what her husband had done.

  “What?” said Michael with an effort into the telephone. “What’s happened?”

  “Two things,” said Tzilla quickly. “One—there are signs that the girl is waking up. Not entirely, but she’s moving her legs and sighing as if she were just asleep, and Einat says that the doctor said that it’s a matter of a few hours until she—”

  “Got it,” said Michael. “And the other thing?”

  “Mr. Beinisch is waiting for you here. The father.”

  “Now?” said Michael in astonishment. “At five in the morning?”

  “It’s already six,” corrected Tzilla. “He has something to say, but he’s not prepared to talk to anyone else, just to you,” she whispered. “I’m holding him in the storeroom. Yair is with him.”

  “Where’s Eli?” asked Michael, and out of the corner of his eye he could see how Balilty’s fingers were gripping the steering wheel.

  “He’s here, talking with the Criminal Identification guy,” said Tzilla. “Why? Do you need something from him? I can call him . . .”

  “Don’t call him,” said Michael, and to his left Balilty’s fingers started to drum on the steering wheel. “Just tell him that I want to have a word with him.”

  “Okay,” she said crisply. “Before you talk to Beinisch or after?”

  “Before,” said Michael. “Beinisch can wait a while longer. It doesn’t make all that much difference anymore.”

  “So I’ll run you over there?” Balilty asked, and turned the key in the ignition. “Or what? Maybe you want some coffee first or a bite to eat? There’s a place on—”

  “Balilty,” threatened Michael.

  “Okay, okay. I was just asking. A healthy mind in a healthy body. I’m not the one who first said that,” he pointed out, and released the hand brake.

  Chapter 16

  First there was the smell. At night it was bitter and dry like the air in the house in the bedroom during the months before her father died, the air because of which Nessia tried to remain in the doorway when they—usually her mother, but sometimes her father, in a whisper that was fright-eningly hoarse—called her to come in and talk to Daddy. (“Come in, Nesseleh, come in, darling,” her mother would beg her, but she was afraid to see the tubes, and the emptiness in the place where there was supposed to be a leg, and afraid that she would not be able to hold her breath and would have to breathe that smell, bitter and dry, which she could not escape, even at night in her bed, for a long time after he died, and even today you could smell it if you buried your head in Mommy’s bed.)

  Gradually her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Someone was sleeping next to the door, on the chair. In the faint light from the corridor—corridor?—she could see that the person had white hair, and in the distance she heard a phone ringing, a high, loud ring, not like at home. The sheet is white and the bed is high. There are two pillows, big ones, not like at home. If you stick your arms out to the sides you discover that the high bed is narrow and you can’t touch the floor with your hands, not only because the bed is high but also because your hands are tied. A needle is stuck to it with brown sticky tape, and a thin tube leads from the needle, and the tube leads to a bag, and the bag is hanging on a pole. A pole like the one that was next to Daddy’s bed, where every so often Nurse Varda or the Arab male nurse Wahid would go over and feel the bag, shake it and sometimes take it off the top of the pole, throw it in the trash can and bring another one. And it was Nessia’s job, ever since the business of the leg, to let her mother get a bit of rest every afternoon—she and her brother Zion—and watch that the drip didn’t stop and that the drops made their way from the bag to the tube. When it emptied they would call Nurse Varda and hear her nylon stockings rubbing together when she moved her legs around the pole or they would call Wahid and look at his large brown fingers and the brown stain on his white athletic shoes. Sometimes Nessia would spend hours watching the drops making their way from the top of the thin pole into the narrow tube, and Varda explained to her that in one bag there was medicine and in the other fluids (“So he won’t dehydrate. Your father can’t drink from a glass anymore, isn’t that so, sweetie?”).

  Now she too has a tube like that and a pole, but there is only one bag and there is no way of knowing whether it is of medicine or fluids. This room where she is lying alone in the dark is a room in a hospital, yes, a hospital, and apparently, she, Nessia, will die soon, just like her father, who first was in the hospital with a pole and a bag and drops that came down and then he died.

  The door is open and the corridor is lit. A nurse in a white uniform walks past, stops in the doorway very close to the person who is sleeping in the chair and peeks inside. This is not Nurse Varda, because she does not have blonde hair and she is not fat, but you can also see the lines of her underpants through the white uniform, where they end exactly, and her white shoes also squeak on the floor. She does not see that Nessia’s eyes are open, because Nessia is lying in the dark. She wants to scream but she holds back. She knows how to keep quiet. Even if she is going to die soon. She is already used to keeping quiet and holding back and keeping everything inside, until it is perfectly clear where she is and what is going on. “What’s new?” asks the nurse in a whisper, and without waiting for an answer she comes into the room.

  The man sitting in the chair next to the door wakes up and says in Peter’s voice: “Sorry. I fell asleep for a moment.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the nurse says. “Sleep, sleep a little, it’s been hours since you . . .”

  Nessia shuts her eyes again. “Before, it seemed to me,” Peter tells the nurse, “that she moved, and maybe I even heard sounds. Maybe in a dream.”

  “She’s not quiet,” agrees the nurse, “but that’s a good sign. We want her not to be quiet, to come out of the coma, to regain consciousness.”

  Only Nessia knows that she can keep her eyes open. She can also move her hands, and scratch her head, but she will wait until there is no one in the room, until there is no one standing there and watching her like that nurse is standing there now. Now she hears the squeaky rubber shoes close to her. The nurse is approaching the bed. She stands there. She bends down over Nessia. And it isn’t dark anymore, there is a little light that goes on. Nessia squeezes her eyelids shut. The nurse is standing very near, and she also has a smell, of soap, but a good smell, a green smell. On Nessia’s wrist a cold finger tightens and presses hard. She stands there, that nurse, for a long moment and then she sighs and apparently writes something down, because this noi
se is the sound of a pen scratching.

  “Vera, Vera,” somebody calls from outside, and the nurse drops something on Nessia’s leg—a clipboard?

  “I’m here, with the girl. I’m just taking her blood pressure,” she says from a distance, and again the rubber soles squeak and Nessia hears the sound of something inflating and then there is pressure on her arm. It hurts, but she doesn’t make a sound. Suddenly there is the sound of air rushing out all at once, and someone else is standing in the room very close to her. She feels him above her and also on the sides and also from behind her, even if she is lying in the bed. Her eyes are shut, but she feels. Someone is holding her tight from behind and there is a heavy hand on her mouth, blocking, suffocating. A smell of perfume, a strong, bitter smell of something else, a blow and all at once her legs are on the ground and she is coughing terribly, wants to throw up. Her legs are dragged along the ground. He pushes and pulls her along the sidewalk under his arm into a smell of plastic. The smell of a car. He folds her legs. It hurts. Another blow, on her head from behind. Large hands around her neck. They are carrying her. Her eyes are covered. A hand on her mouth. A large hand but not hard. Rosie whines. It is dark all the time. It is dark and the floor is cold and it is dark and there is heavy breathing above her. She is thirsty and she is nauseous, and it is dark all around, the kind of darkness you can’t see anything in, not even your own hands. She wants to throw up but nothing comes out. She wants to scream, but no sound comes out. Not even a groan. She cannot move her hands. Something is restraining them. At the wrists. Tied. Squeezed. Her arms, too. A heavy hand is laid on her mouth, blocking, pressing. Two hands. The horrible smell enters her nostrils and her mouth and her skin. It overwhelms her completely. The nausea. Again she wants to throw up. And then darkness again.

  For a moment she opens her eyes and again stares at the faint light in the corridor. Next to the door, the empty chair. No one is sitting in the empty chair. Anyone could come in. Her eyes close again and then she reopens them. For a moment, as she blinks in the dazzling light, the night smells mingle with another smell, familiar, delicate, of flowers, maybe roses. A smell that reminds her, after she shuts her eyes again and concentrates, of the white bottle with the blue ship that stands on the shelf at Yigal’s place. And once she opened it and sprayed a bit on herself, as if his shaving drops were perfume. A smell of sweat, and bleach also, come very close to her face, and a little cloud of heavy breath, all of which tell her that her mother is leaning over her. And then come the voices. Her mother’s voice, whispering very close to her: “You who hold every living creature in Your hand and the spirit of every man’s flesh, in Your hand is the power and the force to raise and strengthen and heal mankind,” just as her mother used to whisper next to Nessia’s father’s bed until he died, just like she, Nessia, would also die; and another voice, young and gentle, a woman’s voice: “Doctor, I’ve been sitting here for several days now. There’s a change. I’m not just . . .”; and a new, completely strange voice, of a person standing close to her and maybe he is touching her arm—the touch hurts, as if there are needles there and as if something is bearing down on her arm—and the voice says: “Excuse me a moment, Mrs. Hayoun,” and he presses something, maybe a finger, yes, a finger, on her wrists and there too it bears down and hurts (but Nessia doesn’t utter a sound, not even a sigh) and the voice says: “There is movement, there are spasms.” He rolls up her eyelids and she holds her breath. She takes in “spasms” and “sensations” and “It could take a another few days,” and a thick voice calls over the loudspeaker: “Dr. Sela, Dr. Sela, to Internal Medicine B,” and someone runs out and inside the room Peter’s voice is also heard, very close to the bed. What is he doing? He is singing to her. She never knew that he knows how to sing. He sings to her very, very quietly, into her ear, and it tickles. But nevertheless she does not move and just holds her breath. In English he is singing her a song she does not know, but the words “my love,” she knows. And again the young voice, the woman’s voice, saying: “Her eyelids are moving. Look, they’re fluttering.” Nessia squeezes her eyelids tighter. She does not want to open her eyes. If she opens her eyes, they will ask her things. She is sure that they have found her things. They will ask her about the carton and maybe they even found the makeup kit. And she has already woken up once to the smell of mold and mildew, the smell of pee-pee, and she was nauseous. She wanted to throw up and it didn’t come out. But then she was on a hard, cold floor, and there was the smell of a wall and darkness, and now it was morning. And she feels the light through her closed eyelids. She hears Peter’s voice that is singing to her, and her mother’s hoarse voice: “You who hold every living creature in Your hand and the spirit of every man’s flesh,” and the voice of the girl, who is saying: “I saw it. I tell you, I saw it, a kind of shudder, sort of, like a tic.”

  Her body is not obeying her. Her body is rebelling. It wants her to open her eyes despite her decision, despite everything that will come afterward, all the questions and the talk. Her eyes want to open and she is struggling with them and feeling how something down in her legs is shaking, tickling her feet. But she thinks about the carton and the blow on the back of her head, and about the hands around her neck and on her mouth, and again she feels the throttling and the darkness and the smell of mildew and the nausea and the smell of the perfume and the strong hands and the cold floor. Rosie howls. As if from far away. A body is pulled. Something has happened to Rosie. Who is taking care of Rosie, if Nessia is here and Mommy is here? How hard it is to keep her eyes closed and not to move, to breathe quietly without moving. “Her leg moved,” says the voice of the woman who was talking to the doctor. “I’ll be right back,” she calls from far away, maybe from the corridor, and Nessia feels the large, chapped hand that is touching her knee and under her knee. Her mother’s hand.

  “She’s lost weight,” she hears her mother’s voice almost wailing as she pinches her flesh. “Her leg is like a matchstick.” And then strangled weeping, in an unfamiliar voice, and a face very close to hers and a smell of cilantro. The hand on her face is her mother’s hand, and the smell is her smell, but this voice, wailing like that, hoarse, can’t possibly be her voice.

  When in one swift movement Michael opened the door to his office—first he had run up the steps, two by two, leaving Balilty behind him to call out: “Wait for me, wait for me a minute, where are you running?”—Eli Bachar was startled. He was sitting there in Michael’s chair as he often did when the room was empty, and as the door swung open he laid his hands on the pile of notes and papers that were scattered in front of him on the desk, as if protecting them.

  “So there you are,”’ he said at the sight of Michael. He squinted with his narrow green eyes and scratched his cheek with his hand, and then went back to looking at the papers as if he could not drag himself away from them. “In the end you show up. I heard that the little girl has woken up, or almost woken up,” he added, and carefully piled the notes and the papers into one stack. The sound of his voice, the lightness with which he spoke, the careful movement of his hand as he smoothed out paper after paper—all seemed forced and fake to Michael. This sense of counterfeit rustled in the air; there was something embarrassing and disturbing about it, and that was another reason he wanted to get the matter over with quickly, even though he already knew that nothing could be finished here, unless it turned out to be something altogether different, but that was unlikely.

  “Look at this,” Eli said, and picked up a slip of paper from the metal surface of the office desk. “Look what it says here,” he said, and began to read slowly and emphatically: ‘“To imprison someone: Take a new piece of pottery and on it write these names and put it in the oven during baking: Assir, Aviyus, Batim Batim, Aviness, Asiruhu Belachashim.’ They’re really something, these spells and amulets, aren’t they?” A kind of forced cheerfulness was in his voice as he held out the slip of paper to Michael, who was still standing on the other side of the desk. “Look. Get a load of th
is. I read it to you word for word.”

  Michael cleared his throat and sat down heavily in the visitors’ chair, and opposite him the hand was still held out with the slip of paper.

  “Do you need your seat?” Eli asked, and rose from the chair. “I’m just waiting here for a message,” he apologized. Since when had Eli ever apologized for sitting in his chair at his desk? “Any moment now they’re supposed to inform me of the results of the DNA test. They said that it takes a while, because just going by the hairs that we found . . . ,” and at the sight of Michael’s dismissive wave, he sat back down in the desk chair.

  Michael had a few openings, three or four. He had intended to approach the subject gradually and say something noncommittal like: “Where were you yesterday? Tzilla and I were looking for you,” or: “What do you think of Miss Shushan’s article?” and to get Eli Bachar to talk of his own initiative, but it all collapsed before those familiar green eyes that were now systematically evading his. It was impossible to plan a cautious move against a person whom you had considered your best friend, whom you had never thought to doubt. Thus, in what he finally said there was not a trace of the things with which he had planned to open.

  “Tell me,” said Michael after he suppressed the “Have I done you any wrong?” that would have escaped him had he not lit the cigarette he rolled between his fingers. There was no tremor in his voice, and his fingers, when he looked at them, looked like they always did, completely steady. “Did you meet with Orly Shushan?”

  For the first time, Eli looked him in the eyes. For a long moment he looked and did not reply. His eyelids fluttered, and there was also a limp nod.

  “I want to hear it from you, exactly,” said Michael throatily. “All the details.”

  Eli Bachar cleared his throat, twice. “I meant to talk to you about this. I didn’t know that . . .” His voice faded as he glanced around, as if looking for something, but Michael said nothing. And as if the silence was too hard to bear, anxiously and apologetically, Eli Bachar said: “I didn’t know that you would see the article so soon. I meant to . . . Do you want some coffee?” he asked. He took a sip from a plastic foam cup and wiped traces of the muddy beverage from his lips. “I meant to speak to you later, after the DNA,” he said, and set the cup down on the desk.